feeling afraid is a very natural and even helpful sometimes, it can be like a warning, a signal that cautions us to be aware. Like all emotions, fear can be mild, Medium, or intense. we are programmed to respond with fear when we sense danger, like poisonous insects or hungry tigers.
But… what about fear when there is no clear and obvious danger, like hearing a baby laughing in the kitchen while you were sure that you’re home alone, or meeting a smiling dog in your way home at midnight. although they don’t contain any evident danger or an obvious threat, there is something a little off about them, so much disturbing and strange-ness. they are Creepy. but what makes them creepy? what gives us the creeps?
Types of fear
Stephen king has defined three types of scary stuff, to make it simple, I’ll give an example to each one. First one is the Gross-out: which is something morbid, disgusting, a bloody body lying in a bathroom.
Second one is the Horror: it’s the unnatural -as Stephen King described it-, a giant spider running towards you with an unbelievable speed, or being grabbed in the dark while you thought you were alone.
Finally, according to King, at the highest (and as he explains, the worst) level of fear is Terror, he says: “It’s when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there’s nothing there…”.
but… Stephen King didn’t mention “creeps” at all as a type of fear, so what’s “Creepy” then ?
What’s “Creepy”?
Well… Not a lot of research has been done on that feeling, the Creeps. But many theories and ideas involve vagueness, ambiguity and mystery. According to Frank McAndrew, a professor of psychology at Knox College in Illinois: Creepy is basically “the uncertainty of threat. Feeling uneasy because you think there might be something to worry about here, but the signals are not clear enough to warrant your doing some sort of desperate, life-saving kind of thing”. being creeped out is a little bit different from fear, when you feel the fear, you have no confusion how to respond, you directly decide to save yourself, but when you’re creeped out, your brain and your body are telling you that something is not quite right and you’d better pay attention because it might hurt you.
That physical response further heightens your senses, McAndrew says: “You don’t know how to act but you’re really concerned about getting more information … It kind of takes your attention and focuses it like a laser on this particular stimulus, whatever it is”.
An explanation for the mystery of “Creepiness”
Several studies have hypothesized that creepiness could be linked to a mechanism called Agent detection, which makes individuals expect malignant agents to be responsible for small changes in our environment. let me give you an example: Let’s say you are walking in a dark valley and you heard a creepy sound, you naturally because of the Agent detection would go in a high alert, fearing that some dangerous individual was there, and then if that wasn’t the case, like these sounds were just normal or made up by your brain, then the loss would be small, you just ran for few meters nothing much, if it was the case, (a dangerous individual was there) and u haven’t been alerted, the loss could’ve been significant and high!.
a characteristic of creepiness is the unpredictable behavior, which brings us back to ambiguity, unpredictable behavior isn’t possible to tell when it will turn violent which adds to the ambiguity a potentially dangerous situation.
another characteristic is the distortion, like an individual walking in an incredible speed, or suddenly everyone starts to walk with feet and hands, these distortions make human not sure how to respond and therefore feel the creeps. In fact, Creepiness is not only related to the situation but also the Description of the individual that initiated the situation, for example, let’s take “Slenderman”, a fictional supernatural character in the Internet, the fact that he has an empty face, no eyes no ears etc… made him Creepy and Scary. because that empty face hides a lot of mysterious actions, nobody knows what would be its reaction when you talk to him or when you just face him… damn, it’s ambiguity again!
Now besides of ambiguity, our language reflects the gray area of terror and creepiness. We need them to survive. We need fears and the creeps, to understand our size, our weaknesses. But, on the other hand, avoiding them is pretty great too.
If you’re reading this, I gotta praise your patience. I guess I’ll call it a day now. If you have any suggestions about new articles/improvements on this article/any questions, don’t hesitate to ask. You can comment here, or email me, or send me a message on Instagram, or send me a message on discord (E11even#1673). Peace!
“When there’s no imagination, there’s no Horror.”
— Arthur Doyle
